Mexico City ? A Wal-Mart-owned discount store rising a half-mile from the ancient temples of Teotihuacan has touched off a fight by a small coalition that doesn’t want to see the big, boxy outlet from the top of the Pyramid of the Sun.

But with most people in the area supporting Wal-Mart, the group is waging a lonely battle for what it calls its defense of Mexico’s landscape and culture.

The dispute in Teotihuacan — a town built next to the ruins of the 2,000-year-old metropolis — illustrates how the allure of low prices and U.S. lifestyles often wins out in Mexico, leaving traditionalists struggling to draw a line in rapidly shifting cultural sands.

“We’d rather not have Mickey Mouse on top of the Pyramid of the Moon,” says Emmanuel D’Herrera, a business owner in Teotihuacan, 30 miles north of Mexico City.

He claims a tall sign will loom near the huge twin pyramids that draw hundreds of thousands of tourists annually, although a government-appointed archaeologist disputes that.

And while the store is visible from atop the pyramid, so are many other modern businesses and houses.

Underlining his group’s lack of support, D’Herrera said probably 70 percent of the town’s mostly poor residents supported the new store because it would offer lower prices than the area’s small shops.

“The housewives want to go shopping with credit cards … and the teenagers want to go skateboarding in the parking lot, like in the United States,” he said.

The archaeologist, Veronica Ortega, said the opponents represent shopkeepers afraid of losing business to Wal-Mart.

A pyramid at Teotihuacanis is shown in this 2003 photo at the archeological site 18 miles from Mexico City. A Wal-Mart store is being built a half-mile from the ancient ruins of Teotihuacan, and a small, embattled group is fighting to preserve Mexico's landscape and culture.

The opponents don’t deny that, but they argue that small stores and markets should be preserved, even if they offer little cultural purity.

“There is a street market at Otumba, a mile or so away, that will be destroyed by Wal-Mart,” D’Herrera said. “The market is full of plastic stuff and Chinese goods, but it still should be preserved.”

While Wal-Mart started work without the presence of the government-mandated archaeologist and refuses to allow any newspaper reporters to visit the site, it says it has “promoted and respected Mexican culture and traditions.”

The store’s walls and roof struts already are up, and Wal-Mart executives say they have taken steps to make the store inconspicuous.

“A number of conditions have been set to make the store blend in,” said Ortega, who monitors the site.

“It will be lower than a regular store — below the tree line. It will have more subdued colors, and a stone facade.”